This was my biggest beef with the Patriot Act actually. If you give the executive branch the power of warrantless surveillance, you are handing someone with immense power a tool no one should have. The patriot act set a horrific precedent. As for Obama's continued use and expansion of it, we'll that is not the person I voted for. I voted on a number of issues for Obama, but this is one action I can't support. He made a terrible precedent set by Bush even worse, and set up an opportunity down the line for someone like Nixon, or even a genuine psychopath like J. Edgar Hoover will have "standard executive practice" as an explanation for their actions.

Meh. I don't generally subscribe to the "if you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" view, but I'm 1000% more pissed about what info Facebook and Apple and Google gather on me than what info might be stored about me in some tiny corner of a galactically huge NSA database that no human being will ever look at.

Yeah, getting unjustly thrown in jail for terrorism would be worse than Facebook suddenly deciding to use my picture in an ad for fetish porn, but factor in the relative odds of each of those things actually happening and the second becomes a much larger real threat.

No matter how you cloak it, what legislation you put it under, no matter what excuse you're pulling out of your ass, this is a blanket warrant-less seizure of private communication of innocent people. You are supposed to find probable cause to ASK for a warrant to tap email, phones, etc....this, allows them to pretty much listen in to whatever they please. They pretty much know where the terrorists are at, in general, and i really don't see violating citizens rights to privacy without a warrant. is needed or can be explained, other than, "Its too much trouble to pick and choose who we listen to, so, we will just listen to you all. That, is unacceptable. Being too lazy to present actual evidence of suspected criminal / terroristic actions / emails is not a valid excuse.

If they're reading 1,000,000 intercepts a day, without any particular idea of who they're looking for or why they're looking at all that data, OF COURSE 999,990 pieces of it are going to be worthless intercepts from innocent people. Buried in all that crap are the 10 items they really need and want and that might actually do some good for national security.

This is why warrantless surveillance and wiretaps are ultimately useless for police agencies. Sure, they can rake in everything. But then they have to go through everything. They have to sort out the 10 pieces they can use from the 999,990 pieces they can't, at tremendous waste of time and energy.

It's why those of us who understand signal-to-noise ratios were never worried about this whole nonsense, and are more angry and annoyed at Facebook's use of our accounts for some undisclosed university's psychological games.

Well it's a good thing they haven't written algorithms to soft through all that data to extrapolate the effectively of political moves and to judge reactions to various events. I mean, if someone had information like that they could perfectly craft their narrative in order to do whatever they want without fear of sever public blowback.